Random Jottingshttp://www.randomjottings.net/
en-usweidners@pacbell.net2014-07-06T19:25:26-08:00daily22000-01-01T12:00+00:00Wildfires and controlled burns...http://www.randomjottings.net/archives/004981.html
Last year there was a huge fire in our area, the Rim Fire. A vast area in the Sierras was turned into a blackened wasteland. 257,314 acres were burned.

And what drives me crazy is that it was totally unnecessary. The way to prevent wildfires is well known. I personally learned of it in the 1960's. What is it? "Controlled burning."

From Wikipedia: Controlled or prescribed burning, also known as hazard reduction burning (HRB) or swailing, is a technique sometimes used in forest management, farming, prairie restoration or greenhouse gas abatement. Fire is a natural part of both forest and grassland ecology and controlled fire can be a tool for foresters. Hazard reduction or controlled burning is conducted during the cooler months to reduce fuel buildup and decrease the likelihood of serious hotter fires.[1] Controlled burning stimulates the germination of some desirable forest trees, thus renewing the forest. Some cones, such as those of Lodgepole Pine and Sequoia, are serotinous, meaning they require heat from fire to open cones to disperse seeds.

Wildfires are not natural. They only happen when a lot of fuel accumulates. Fallen leaves and needles, dead trees and fallen branches, and areas that have become choked with vegetation. The fuel builds up for decades, and and when it burns it is like nuclear bombs going off. The eara where the Rim Fire happened had not burned since 1989.

But in nature forests burn every few years. These fires are usually what are called "cool fires," because not much fuel has accumulated since the last fire. They are ground fires, that move erratically, burning along the ground, but not igniting healthy trees. The results are more open forests, instead of dense thicketty ones.

These kinds of fires can be produced intentionally. The pictures below were taken by my daughter, when she drove through Groveland recently. Notice that among the dead trees, vegetation is returning. Suppose, in 3 or 4 years, in say May, when things are still fairly cool and moist, fires were lit in the area. They would not be catastrophic wildfires, because there wouldn't be enough to burn. Patches of dried vegetation would burn, dead plants would burn, but it would be too soon, and too early in the year to result in a "hot fire." And if you kept doing that every 3 or 4 years, you would never have a hot fire. The fuel would never get a chance to gather.

...Look, I'm not going to consider whether or not communists can be very smart. Maybe they can. I've never met any, though.

Oh, raw IQ, sure. But people don't move and choose through raw IQ. My brother is brilliant. He's also a deeply conventional man. This mean his thoughts move only in the "approved thoughts for brilliant people" mode of the last century - that is, leftist...

We see this all around us. People locked into the thought-forms of the past. That in itself is self-imposed stupidity. But it is much worse for those people now, because the old conglomerations of beliefs simply don't work any more. They used to work moderately well,.

The Blue Model, for instance, has been the dominant paradigm of the 20th century. And it worked quite well, though I suspect it was not the best model to follow. The Republican platform for all my life has basically been that we can make the Democrat model work better than they can. People who thought outside the paradigm were "crazies and bomb-throwers." "Neanderthals." "Kooks."

But to defend the model now you have to make yourself stupid. You have to fill your brain with "road closed" signs. Same with believing in CAGW. (Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming.) Or believing in top-down management of any kind. Thinking that government (or big business) can "manage" the economy. Or that the WH can "manage" our diets. These are all crazy ideas, and you have to make yourself stupid to think them and ignore evidence to the countrary.

You have to make yourself stupid to think that people can just re-define a ten-thousand year old institution like marriage and not get ramifying unforeseen consequences. Or, more generally, to re-define anything, and expect everything else to just keep going slog the same.

...With public school students using #ThanksMichelle to tweet photos of their skimpy, stomach-turning school lunches, I decided to look at what Michelle Obama's daughters are served at Sidwell Friends school, and it turns out the girls dine on lunches from menus designed by chefs.

First Lady Michelle Obama's "Let's Move" program is responsible for low calorie limits on public school students and lunch gruel that resulted in tweets like this:

First Lady Michelle Obama's daughters attend Sidwell Friends, and their meals include hot lunches that are prepared every day fresh-from-scratch. The company that caters the food, Meriwether-Godsey, uses chefs to prepare the food on-site - from scratch - with local and organic foods where possible.

These people are crazy. Liberals have become literally and simply crazy. Insane. Sick. They are lost in a wilderness of their own making.

You have to destroy your mind and conscience to be a "liberal" today. A leftist. A "Progressive," or a "Quaker." These all started out with good intentions, and have all turned into twisted monsters.

Liberalism (libertarianism too) takes many forms, but is always deep-down the idea that we humans can navigate ourselves, by our own reason. Without reference to any external landmarks or guide-stars. This always fails , for the same reason Inertial Navigation always fails for ships or spacecraft. Astronauts on our Lunar flights took frequent star sights, using sextants. They corrected their navigation by referring to the fixed stars.

Every "liberal" voyage goes astray, because they have no fixed stars for guidance.

]]>4979@http://www.randomjottings.net/LeftLunacy2014-05-30T21:33:35-08:00Witless folly...http://www.randomjottings.net/archives/004978.html
"Social engineers." Egad. As Tim Blair once wrote, "Nothing good ever begins with the word 'social.'" This piece is a good example.

...Even if we assume that the privacy issues can be resolved, the idea of what Pentland calls a "data-driven society" remains problematic. Social physics is a variation on the theory of behavioralism that found favor in McLuhan's day, and it suffers from the same limitations that doomed its predecessor. Defining social relations as a pattern of stimulus and response makes the math easier, but it ignores the deep, structural sources of social ills. Pentland may be right that our behavior is determined largely by social norms and the influences of our peers, but what he fails to see is that those norms and influences are themselves shaped by history, politics, and economics, not to mention power and prejudice. People don't have complete freedom in choosing their peer groups. Their choices are constrained by where they live, where they come from, how much money they have, and what they look like. A statistical model of society that ignores issues of class, that takes patterns of influence as givens rather than as historical contingencies, will tend to perpetuate existing social structures and dynamics. It will encourage us to optimize the status quo rather than challenge it.

Politics is messy because society is messy, not the other way around. Pentland does a commendable job in describing how better data can enhance social planning. But like other would-be social engineers, he overreaches. Letting his enthusiasm get the better of him, he begins to take the metaphor of "social physics" literally, even as he acknowledges that mathematical models will always be reductive. "Because it does not try to capture internal cognitive processes," he writes at one point, "social physics is inherently probabilistic, with an irreducible kernel of uncertainty caused by avoiding the generative nature of conscious human thought." What big data can't account for is what's most unpredictable, and most interesting, about us.

"Social Physics" can't tell you what The Good is. It can't tell you what is important, what it is that you should be looking for. I think it was Einstein who said, your theory controls what you can see.

...Once we write the algorithms needed to parse all that "big data," many sociologists and statisticians believe, we'll be rewarded with a much deeper understanding of what makes society tick...

No you won't. You will just see whatever you already believe. Like those academics who, from time to time, "prove" by "scientific" research that Republicans are crazy and conservatives are stupid. Or that Australian "scientist" who proved that those who deny the Climate Change Religion are more likely to believe crazy conspiracy theories.

You can see here the fundamental absurdity of liberalism, which is always, deep down, the idea that we humans can guide ourselves, by our own reason, without reference to external landmarks. Even if it worked, this kind of thinking can't tell you where you should try to go.

...What really excites Pentland is the prospect of using digital media and related tools to change people's behavior, to motivate groups and individuals to act in more productive and responsible ways...

"More productive" of what? Who defines "responsible?" Wanna bet that "science" will tell us that social scientists from MIT are the ideal candidates for such power?

]]>4978@http://www.randomjottings.net/LeftLunacy2014-04-22T18:35:17-08:00Apologies for the fathomless silence...http://www.randomjottings.net/archives/004977.html
NOTE: Comments are off, because I'm being deluged with spam, even with the captcha. And I just don't have time or skills to deal with it. Feel free to email.

For any old friends who may still be reading, I've been MIA because the Weidners have been engaged in our biggest and most difficult operation since the annus mirabilus of 1985, when John and Charlene got married, joined a church, had a baby and bought a fixer-upper house, all in one crazy year.

No more babies this time, but we've pulled up stakes and moved to the country. After more than 40 years in the big city. We are now living in Sonora, CA. A Gold Country town in the foothills of the Sierras, about 2 1/2 hours due east of SF.

I haven't blogged all this, both because of a superstitious dread that we might jinx things, and also because it's been horribly hard work. We've been pretty much working 7 days a week for more than 6 months.

We haven't retired. Charlene's lawyering covers N Calif, so she's no more out of things here than in SF. With an Internet connection she can do most of her work from anywhere. (Internet was a big problem. We ended up having a T-1 line laid in.) And I'm farther from my old customers, but have more space to work more efficiently and that may balance out. And I may find cabinetmaking work around here too.

It's a big upheaval for our kids, but their careers and lives were not flourishing in SF, so maybe a change will be good for them.

And frankly, we've been feeling like a lot of things in liberal SF, underneath a thin veneer of "niceness," are increasingly just evil. (And, worse than evil, downright stupid!) When we started our "urban project" long ago, we we thought our neighbors were too far to the left, but we assumed they we were all sailing on parallel courses. Turns out, not so. We have diverged. (For myself, the turning point was 9/11. I had always assumed that, disgusting as lefty anti-Americanism was to me, if America were attacked in a way similar to Pearl Harbor, we would all come together in her defense. To observe leftists claiming that the 9/11 attack was a result of our sins, and seeing how they hated the displays of American flags, was a huge eye-opener for me. It was sick and crazy. Evil, pure evil. I started this blog a month later.)

I feel like God has hugely favored us. I prayed for help to escape the tangles of many frustrations in SF, and the whole thing just unfolded. Deo gratias!

Anyway, we are loving Sonora so far. Working like crazy. Were having lots of work done on the house, we are planting trees and vines so as to not miss the year's growth. I'm getting my shop put together, and spraying herbicides on Poison Oak. We have ten acres, which should keep us busy for the rest of our lives.

Here are a few pix...

Charlene and the back of our house, where the gardens and terraces are...

My sons moving rocks with our tractor, a John Deere 4310...

We get this every evening. We've never lived with a view before. That's East Sonora in the distance.

For a rock-lover like me, this place is mind boggling. I could take a hundred pix like this...

]]>4977@http://www.randomjottings.net/Family and friends2014-04-05T22:19:31-08:00"They feel left out of the good life, unable even to strive for it."http://www.randomjottings.net/archives/004976.html
This is a great piece on Hernando de Soto, De Soto's Excellent Path . I was especially struck by this...

...The team discovered that, in the two months after Bouazizi self-immolated, 63 more men and women had done the same. They did it in country after country. Like Bouazizi, they were entrepreneurs, or would-be entrepreneurs. ILD talked to their families, and they also talked to survivors: Thirty-seven of the 63 failed in their suicide attempts. In the documentary, one of these 37 shows the scars all over his body. "I tried every possible way to get my rights in society, to find work," he says. "I tried a thousand things," with no success. He felt trapped, finished.
De Soto testified to the U.S. Congress about the Middle East last year. In an understatement (as I see it), he said, "Mass suicide in defense of property rights is hard for the modern Western mind to understand." Why would someone like Bouazizi kill himself over the confiscation of some fruit and the scale with which to weigh it? But Bouazizi's act was motivated by a lot more than that, de Soto has explained -- to Congress, in his film, and to me: Bouazizi was under the whim of local authorities, who could choke off his every avenue. There was nowhere to go, no other authority to appeal to, no veritable rule of law. His last words, before he lit the match, were, "How do you expect me to make a living?" ILD asked Bouazizi's family what they thought he had died for. They answered, "For the right to buy and sell."

To Congress, de Soto said, "The average Arab entrepreneur needs to present 57 documents and faces two years or more of red tape to obtain a legal property right over land or a business." In Egypt, the legal opening of a business "requires dealing with 29 different government agencies and navigating 215 sets of laws." Arabs, like the majority of the world's population, lack basic property rights and related rights. They feel left out of the good life, unable even to strive for it. In his film, de Soto says that the Arab Spring amounts to "a huge shout for inclusion."...

Jefferson's original phrase for the Declaration of Independence was "life, liberty and property." We should have stuck with it.

]]>4976@http://www.randomjottings.net/Business and Economics2014-03-19T08:51:14-08:00Is life worth living?http://www.randomjottings.net/archives/004975.html
...It is as old as Robinson Crusoe; as old as man. Our race has not been strained for all these ages through that sieve of dangers that we call Natural Selection, to sit down with patience in the tedium of safety; the voices of its fathers call it forth. Already in our society as it exists, the bourgeois is too much cottoned about for any zest in living; he sits in his parlour out of reach of any danger, often out of reach of any vicissitude but one of health; and there he yawns.

If the people in the next villa took pot-shots at him, he might be killed indeed, but, so long as he escaped, he would find his blood oxygenated and his views of the world brighter. If Mr Mallock, on his way to the publishers, should have his skirts pinned to the wall by a javelin, it would not occur to him - at least for several hours - to ask if life were worth living; and if such peril were a daily matter, he would ask it never more; he would have other things to think about, he would be living indeed ...

...I certainly agree about the mind-bending banality of the Times opinion page and the windiness (at best) of Friedman. But I think the reporters are off the mark on the cause. They can blame it on Rosenthal if they wish -- I have no opinion, not working there -- but the real problem is far greater than any one editor.

To adopt what is becoming a modern cliché -- it's the ideology, stupid.

The Times reporters complained of the page's uniformly negative tone, but not even S.J. Perelman or P.G. Wodehouse could write with verve in the service of modern liberalism. You can't bring a dead horse to life. No writer is that good -- at least on a regular basis.

How, for example, do you write an eloquent defense of Obamacare or justify the administration's actions in Benghazi without resorting to the kind of obfuscation that makes for convoluted, or at best tedious, writing? How do you advocate for yet more government programs in a country already so mired in debt it's hard to see how it will ever get out? It's Keynesian economics itself that's the problem, not Paul Krugman.

Although I admire many of the writers at the Wall Street Journal, let's admit they have a lot more to work with, a plethora of easy targets for a man or woman with even a modicum of wit. We live in an era when readers are distrusting big government more than ever. Where does that leave the NYT, that great tribune of of ever-expanding government? With a bunch of grumps on their hands....

When I was young the NYT was referred to as "the flagship of the Eastern Liberal Establishment." But back then there really was an "establishment," a generally recognized set of ideas and people that almost everyone considered the legitimate guides of our society. And it was as much Republican as Democrat.

But that world is gone. Their model was the one created in the last phase of the Industrial Age. It was captured in Richard Nixon's quip, that "we are all Keynesians now." Ironically said at the time when that sort of economics was failing and the Information Age was beginning.

The NYT's business model is to maintain a cocoon where those in denial about the massive failure of "liberal" institutions all around us can pretend that nothing has changed. The real excitement and new ideas are elsewhere.

]]>4974@http://www.randomjottings.net/LeftLunacy2014-02-10T09:21:45-08:00A good put-down...http://www.randomjottings.net/archives/004973.html
Peggy Noonan, The Sleepiness of a Hollow Legend:

Good snark, (and a great title) but wrong on a deep level...

...The poor speechwriters. They are always just a little more in touch with public sentiment than a president can be--they get to move around in the world, they know what people are saying. They have to imitate the optimism of the speeches of yore, they have to rouse. They are the ones who know what a heavy freaking lift it is, what an impossible chore. And they have to do it with idiots in the staffing process scrawling on the margins of the draft: "More applause lines!" The speechwriters know the answer is fewer applause lines, more thought, more humility and candor. Americans aren't impressed anymore by congressmen taking to their feet and cheering. They look as if they have electric buzzers on their butts that shoot them into the air when the applause line comes. "Now I have to get up and enact enthusiasm" is what they look like they're thinking. While the other party thinks "Now we have to get up too, because what he said was anodyne and patriotic and we can't not stand up for that." And they applaud, diffidently, because they don't want the folks back home--the few who are watching--to say they looked a little too enthusiastic about the guy who just cost them their insurance.

They are all enacting. They are all replicating. They're all imitating the past.

You know when we will know America is starting to come back? When some day the sergeant at arms bellows: "Mr. Speaker, the president of the United States" and the camera shows a bubble of suits and one person emerges from the pack and walks into the chamber and you're watching at home and you find yourself--against everything you know, against all the accumulated knowledge of the past--interested. It'll take you aback when you realize you're interested in what he'll say! And the members won't just be enacting, they'll be leaning forward to hear.

And the president will speak, and what he says will be pertinent to the problems of the United States of America. And thoughtful. And he'll offer ideas, and you'll think: "Hey, that sounds right."

That is when you'll know America just might come back.

Until then, as John Dickerson just put it: Barack Obama, Inaction Figure.

Zzzzzzz....

I don't actually agree with that "America is starting to come back" stuff. I don't think America is an organism controlled by a central processing unit in Washington. Or in New York. The important changes happen elsewhere, often in places nobody expects them to. This is more true in the Information Age by an order of magnitude.

And if we ever become a country dependent on top-down management, then we are not America anymore.

But this is dead on: "They are all enacting. They are all replicating. They're all imitating the past." When you enter a new age of the world, then every institution needs to change or die. And that change involves two necessary things. One, you must adapt to a new situation, a new way of thinking. Two, you need to remain who you are, in essence.

And the almost-invariable response is to try to do one or the other. You get liberals who want to tear everything apart and rebuild it the image of whatever impressed them when they were in their 20's. And conservatives fighting the liberals and trying to keep things "the way they're supposed to be." Both are wrong. Either response fails.

As the implementation of Obamacare sent Democratic poll numbers plummeting in recent months, party leaders responded with an Obamacare message they hope will spare their candidates from the wrath of voters in 2014: Mend it, don't end it. [In related news, Democrats declare most voters wish to fix the Death Star, not abolish it.]

"I think what most Americans want us to do is not repeal Obamacare, which is what our Republican colleagues are focused on, but fix it," Senator Chuck Schumer of New York said during a December 22 appearance on Meet the Press. "The president is working to fix it; we are working in the Senate to fix it; we urge our Republican colleagues to join us in fixing it." [For maybe the first time in my life, Republicans aren't going to play your sucker's game. Ha ha.]

Which parts of Obamacare need to be fixed, and how will Senate Democrats fix them? Schumer didn't say. Perhaps that's because a Democratic plan to fix Obamacare doesn't exist. [The only plan is to talk vaguely about a plan, to conceal their utter intellectual bankruptcy.]

One Democratic senator tells THE WEEKLY STANDARD that plans to fix Obamacare haven't even been discussed at weekly Democratic Senate caucus meetings. "Never talked about it in the caucus," Senator Pat Leahy of Vermont said on Tuesday. "But I would note just a generality: It's difficult to get a consensus on fixing when the other side simply says, 'Repeal it all--all-or-nothing.'" [Why would that be? Why would a Dem plan require this?]

Other Democrats insist they're working in a smaller group on a plan to fix Obamacare, but they just haven't released it yet. "There's actually a group of us who are starting to work on a series of changes," Senator Mark Warner of Virginia told THE WEEKLY STANDARD on Tuesday. "The question will become: Will this be able to build a bipartisan approach, or it will be one side only?" [Why should Republicans pull your chestnuts out of the fire? Screw bipartisanship. It's always a fake.]

Warner didn't elaborate on who is in the group or what fixes might be proposed. "I'd rather not get into the some of the details yet," he said. [I'll bet] The only specific problem he mentioned was the "30-hour cliff"--the law's (temporarily-suspended) provision that large employers must provide health insurance to employees who work more than 30 hours per week or pay steep fines. [A nation of part-timers they've made us. Brilliant!]

Warner declined to say if he would support a delay of the individual mandate for all Americans in 2014. "I think I'll get back to you when we get the whole package together," he said. [Uh huh. Right.]

Democrats are quick to point out that President Obama has used his executive authority to change problematic parts of the law. But many of the administrative "fixes"--delaying the employer mandate and delaying the individual mandate for people who lost plans because of Obamacare--have actually undermined the law. [Not to mention that he violated the very law the Dems passed. The Rule of Law of course no longer applies to "Democrats."] Letting some people temporarily escape from the law isn't supposed to down costs, it's supposed to make the law more palatable to voters.

If and when Senate Democrats get around to fixing Obamacare (a law that's been on the books for nearly four years), it's not clear that they will propose anything designed to address any of the law's biggest problems, such as higher costs and narrower provider networks for people forced onto Obamacare. [There's still probably no human being who has read the whole law. 2,700 pages. But they propose to "fix" it.]

When Virginia's junior senator, Democrat Tim Kaine, was asked last week if premiums for Obamacare plans are too high, he replied, "No."

"It depends sort of on where you are," Kaine told THE WEEKLY STANDARD. "You read about some premiums that are really good stories, and then you read some challenging stories. And there are going to be people who are better off and worse off." [Stories! Pfui. They have the same problem socialists always have. Once the government starts setting prices, it is no longer possible to know what anything casts, or should cost.]

According to Kaine, Democrats are "kicking ideas around" to fix Obamacare, but he didn't provide any specific examples. "I'm going to keep it kind of vague," he said. "When I'm ready to sign onto something, I'll sign on to something." [Coward.]

When Pennsylvania senator Bob Casey was asked which parts of the law needed to be changed, he highlighted repeal of the medical device tax as a top priority. "Medical device is one of them. That's probably the most significant example," Casey told THE WEEKLY STANDARD last week. [That tax is pure insanity, to be sure. But repealing it won't give the slightest bit of help to ordinary Americans.] "There might be others down the road." A standalone measure to repeal the medical device tax already passed the House and has the support of 79 senators, but Majority Leader Harry Reid has refused to bring this minor proposal up for a vote.

Democratic senators like Tim Kaine and Bob Casey have the luxury of supporting vague or minor tweaks to the law. They're not up for reelection until 2018. Their colleagues who have to face voters in less than ten months may need to come up with better ideas--if they can. [They couldn't do it even if they weren't stupid. The whole thing is rotten deep down. It can't be fixed.]

]]>4972@http://www.randomjottings.net/Business and Economics2014-01-16T19:38:19-08:00Communities of practice...http://www.randomjottings.net/archives/004971.html

As I've written before, the limiting factor in the Industrial Age was information processing. [Links] You could build a trans-continental railroad system, but you still moved information on little slips of paper. Which was painfully clumsy and inefficient. So every organization became a sort of "computer with human components." Processing information into reports and graphs; filing, collating, retrieving... boiling it down.

Colleges and the college degree was one of those mechanisms. A degree was worth having because it was a compilation of information an employer could rely on. In a rough way, you could say that an Ivy League degree would put you on a track into top management, a state college degree said you were middle-management material, and a junior college diploma meant you were a person for supervisor level jobs. (A degree worked the same way for social status. An Ivy degree said you were fitted for the elite.)

But the degree system was an awkward work-around, because there was no simple way to investigate thousands of people in detail.

...The value of paper degrees will inevitably decline when employers or other evaluators avail themselves of more efficient and holistic ways for applicants to demonstrate aptitude and skill. Evaluative information like work samples, personal representations, peer and manager reviews, shared content, and scores and badges are creating new signals of aptitude and different types of credentials. Education-technology companies EduClipper and Pathbrite, and also general-interest platforms such as Tumblr and WordPress, are used to show online portfolios. Brilliant has built a math-and-physics community that identifies and challenges top young talent. Knack, Pymetrics, and Kalibrr use games and other assessments that measure work-relevant aptitudes and attitudes. HireArt is a supercharged job board that allows applicants to compete in work challenges relevant to job openings. These new platforms are measuring signals of aptitude with a level of granularity and recency never before possible.

There are sites -- notably Degreed and Accredible -- that adapt existing notions of the credential to a world of online courses and project work. But there are also entire sectors of the innovation economy that are ceasing to rely on traditional credentials and don't even bother with the skeumorph of an adapted degree. Particularly in the Internet's native careers - design and software engineering -- communities of practice have emerged that offer signals of types and varieties that we couldn't even imagine five years ago. Designers now show their work on Dribbble or other design posting and review sites. Software engineers now store their code on GitHub, where other software engineers will follow them and evaluate the product of their labor. On these sites, peers not only review each other but interact in ways that build reputations within the community. User profiles contain work samples and provide community generated indicators of status and skill.

In these fields in the innovation economy, traditional credentials are not only unnecessary but sometimes even a liability. A software CEO I spoke with recently said he avoids job candidates with advanced software engineering degrees because they represent an overinvestment in education that brings with it both higher salary demands and hubris. It's a red flag that warns that a candidate is likely to be an expensive, hard-to-work-with diva who will show no loyalty to the company. MBAs have an even more challenged reputation in the innovation economy. Several of the education startups I advise that directly provide programs to students -- notably Dev Bootcamp and the Fullbridge Program -- recently met with other immersive unaccredited programs to consider whether to jointly develop a new type of credential. Their conclusion: Credentials are so 20th century....

And note, when you have "communities of practice" doing the evaluating and sorting of people, this is using all the brains of the community to solve a problem. This is the opposite of top-down management.

]]>4971@http://www.randomjottings.net/Information Age2014-01-10T08:12:46-08:00Behold now behemoth...http://www.randomjottings.net/archives/004970.html
I've been thinking about health care for a long time, but never blogged it much, because, well, 'cause I just never got around to it. But I saw my physician today, and she is SO not happy with Obamacare.

...Nunamaker and Umbehr opened Atlas MD, a direct primary care practice, in 2009 shortly after Umbehr left residency. They charge $50 a month in membership fees for adults ages 20 to 44, with fees ranging from $10 to $100 a month for pediatric and older patients.

They describe their payment structure on the Atlas MD website as a "direct fee-for-services arrangement [that] frees us from the typical contractual agreements that prevent physicians from offering wholesale prices on laboratory tests, imaging, and medications."

The practice quickly grew to about 600 patients in the first couple of years, with a monthly revenue of $30,000 in membership fees. The only marketing has been word of mouth.

They said patients loved the open access to their physicians. Patients are encouraged to email, call, or text their doctors with questions. The office has no office staff, and the physicians answer the phones, which they said "freaks out" patients at times.

Nunamaker and Umbehr said they loved not having to deal with insurance payers for such issues as prior authorizations or rejected claims....

I fortunately have not had my insurance cancelled... yet. But even so I am filled with bitter hatred of this loathsome and un-constitutional power grab by Democrats. And proud that I've never voted for the Party of Death in my life!

]]>4970@http://www.randomjottings.net/Business and Economics2014-01-09T14:11:34-08:00Suffer, all you horrid little commies...http://www.randomjottings.net/archives/004969.html
I just laugh every time I think of this...

These are good days for George Zimmerman. He's selling art for big bucks, he got his guns back, and ..., um, well, he's back with Samantha Sheibe....

]]>4969@http://www.randomjottings.net/America2013-12-23T10:44:22-08:00A background in communicating...http://www.randomjottings.net/archives/004968.html
Poor Peggy has a piece about how she's starting "to worry about the basic competency of the administration, its ability to perform the most fundamental duties of executive management." I told her that was coming back in 2009, but did she listen?

...People who run big businesses learn these facts of executive leadership early on. So do leaders of small businesses and great nonprofit organizations, and local political leaders in charge of local agencies whose success or failure can be charted.

Most of the Obama people just don't have a background in executing. They have a background in communicating, not doing. That's where their talent is--it's where their boss's talent is--and it's a good talent, but not one that will in itself force a government to work well....

They took a 46-year old who had never accomplished anything, never run anything in his life, and put him in charge of the whole shebang. And then people are surprised when he turns out to be more of a talker than a doer?

And "A background in communicating" can be useful... as long as you are communicating Truth.

]]>4968@http://www.randomjottings.net/Barack Obama2013-12-18T07:33:39-08:00Socialism Kills...http://www.randomjottings.net/archives/004967.html
I set this article aside in 2009 (!!) meaning to blog it, and I just found it now. It is as timely now as it was then. Maybe a little more now to me, because although I'm very impressed with Papa Frank's new document, Evangelii Gaudium, I think his economic thoughts are defective.

As the world approaches the 20th anniversary of the fall of communism, it is worth investigating the costs borne by countries like India that did not become communist but drew heavily on the Soviet model. For three decades after its independence in 1947, India strove for self-sufficiency instead of the gains of international trade, and gave the state an ever-increasing role in controlling the means of production. These policies yielded economic growth of 3.5 percent per year, which was half that of export-oriented Asian countries, and yielded slow progress in social indicators, too. Growth per capita in India was even slower, at 1.49 percent per year. It accelerated after reforms started tentatively in 1981, and shot up to 6.78 percent per year after reforms deepened in the current decade.

What would the impact on social indicators have been had India commenced economic reform one decade earlier, and enjoyed correspondingly faster economic growth and improvements in human development indicators? This paper seeks to estimate the number of "missing children," "missing literates," and "missing non-poor" resulting from delayed reform, slower economic growth, and hence, slower improvement of social indicators. It finds that with earlier reform, 14.5 million more children would have survived, 261 million more Indians would have become literate, and 109 million more people would have risen above the poverty line. The delay in economic reform represents an enormous social tragedy. It drives home the point that India's socialist era, which claimed it would deliver growth with social justice, delivered neither....

]]>4967@http://www.randomjottings.net/Business and Economics2013-11-28T08:26:12-08:00